Toshikazu Watanabe 2023-02-13 10:30

On February 2, Cloudflare Japan held a business strategy presentation for the press. Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder of Cloudflare, President and Chief Operating Officer, visited Japan to review the company’s business, as well as the current market overview and business strategy.

Zatlyn began by stating that “everything is moving to digital platforms, and the internet is becoming increasingly important,” and pointed out that this trend has been accelerated by the pandemic.

Michelle Zatlyn (left) of Cloudflare and Tomonari Sato of Cloudflare Japan

With the promotion of work style reform and the spread of telework, the use of cloud services is expanding. Therefore, elements such as “efficiency”, “reliability”, and “security” have been required for the Internet. However, Zatlyn pointed out that “the Internet was not originally designed to meet those requirements.” Looking back, the company was founded to fill such a gap.

Since its founding in 2009, the company has “made the Internet safer, faster, and more reliable,” while its activities “block 1 billion cyberattacks per day every day,” “operate data centers in more than 1260 cities in 100 countries,” and more than 275,1 networks and interconnections.”

The State of Cloudflare
Cloudflare Platform Scale

He added that the company’s core value is innovation, adding, “The core platform is being added and improved on a weekly basis, and users can always get something new,” Zatlyn said.

Next, Mr. Tomonari Sato, President of Cloudflare Japan, explained the domestic business strategy. First of all, with the spread of the use of the Internet, many cyberattacks and incidents via the Internet are reported on a daily basis.” “In order to prevent attacks that you don’t know where they come from over the Internet, it is necessary to keep the entire Internet clean and transform it into a safe and reliable one.”

Cloudflare’s role in Japan

Regarding security awareness, he said, “Japan is an island country, so it tends to seem that there is a disconnect with what is happening overseas, but since the Internet has no borders, cyber threats are spreading from anywhere, and in some cases, even to personal home environments.”

Looking back on the goals he set when he took office as president in March 2022, he said, “I am renewing my determination.” Regarding the changes over the past year, he introduced figures such as “PoP (Point of Presence) in Japan increased from 3 to 1”, “New customers increased by 7% compared to the previous year”, “Business scale increased by about 10% compared to the previous year”, “Zero trust solution grew 164 times compared to the previous year”, and “Japan corporation strengthened its personnel structure from 100 to 7”. Currently Japan is the fastest growing market in the world.

Based on these achievements, the company has been recognized as a content distribution network (CDN) vendor by users and partners, and said, “We have transformed from a CDN vendor to a comprehensive Internet provider in the past year.” This is in response to the fact that the use of “zero trust services”, “developer services”, “network services”, etc. is expanding in addition to the “application services” of CDNs.

Expanding business domain from CDN to comprehensive Internet provider

Furthermore, as priority measures for fiscal 2023, “Strengthen the system for timely use of the latest technology together with global organizations”, “Promote support systems for each industry”, “Strengthen and promote legal response to Japan”, “Launch of Cloudflare Community”, “Further expansion of personnel structure”, and “Development of programs that contribute to Japan society” We will work on such contents.

Priority Measures in the Japan in Fiscal 2023